Hope for the Present is as Important as hope for the Resurrection
Religion without concern for the present is useless; all who seek God in a broken world should avoid it.
Religion is activism set afire by faith through love for God and neighbor. Good religion opposes humanity’s self-destructive nature and longs to conquer our inherent violence.
Religion’s goal for its adherents is to loose them on society as burning lights who expose all that harms and corrupts so that we all share in the bounty of God’s creation. Religion is always a political force through its call to goodness.
I’m certain that my life experiences led me to challenge the ideologies of the religious group of my youth and early adult years. While I was still very young, the ecstatic practices of the Pentecostal church were a curious phenomenon to me. I grew to understand that God in love and mercy touched the most vulnerable in their emotional releases and their experience of pneumatikos (spiritual things) was very real. I just desired more than a spiritual experience of emotional release. It seemed to me there were more important issues in the world than therapeutic spirituality. I longed for a spirituality that met the concrete reality of our broken world with viable plans to repair the world.
Nonetheless, I attempted to work within the confines of Pentecostal teachings, though it became more difficult as life unfolded. There are still aspects of Pentecostal culture that I remain quite comfortable with, simply because they are the people from whom I came. Yet, the movement changed over time and rather than being the disinherited, they became more accepted and grew in wealth and influence. The Pentecostal people’s use of television media and entertainment generated an unhealthy atmosphere of arrogance, where pride was accepted and this resulted in a lack of Christ-likeness.[i] This spirit continues into the present day to the shame of our forefathers.
Likewise, Pentecostalism did not question the encroaching power of America’s culture to impact their religious expression in the world; manifest destiny, white supremacy, and a celebration of ignorance all weakened the movement; being ‘spirit-filled’ (to speak in tongues) exalted ecstatic experience as authoritative rather than accepting the hard work of academic study. The use of scripture became subject to whimsical claims by people who interpreted scripture according to their ignorance and desires.
I am grateful for the effort of the disinherited (Pentecostals) who roamed across the earth with the message of Jesus to bring bibles and proclaim that God could be experienced in life-changing ways; I was one of them; particularly in the eighties when I was living in Leyte with my family, traveling the islands doing evangelistic work and running a weekly service in Tacloban City.
Later in life, I traveled to the Philipines during the summers and worked with students learning to help communities of need; specifically, incarcerated persons, women in the sex industry, the poor at dumpsites and slums, tribal groups, and local churches. We were on a national highway that ran along the coast northwards from Zambales. I wanted to demonstrate to my students the significance of the efforts of Pentecostals to reach out to oppressed and neglected groups. I told them we would take the next dirt road heading toward the adjacent mountain range and that at the end of the dirt road we would find a Pentecostal church reaching out to the Aeta (the indigenous tribal group of the Philippines). At the end of the road, an old man met us and pointed us to the Pentecostal church at the base of the mountain and resting in the midst of a heavily forested area. We learned from other church members that the Aeta came down from the mountains for the church services.
In the eighties, I had been reading Kierkegaard and ordering theology books by mail because the local Christian Bookstores were filled with pop-culture Christianity. I began attending seminary in 1998, I was 43 years old. My first year I determined to be quiet, say nothing, only listen. My professors had given their lives to academic learning and I was certain I had a lot to learn. At the time I was also pastoring a church, working my plumbing business, and helping my parents at their Hardware store.
I learned to listen in Seminary, to discern the statements made by my teachers that were derived from years of study and cherish those memorable lines. I was a voracious reader and devoured books until I needed glasses. Today I am a religious writer, a poet, a theologian and care deeply about the communication of Christianity in the world. God is always more than, always more than anyone has said or written.
Christianity is also more than, always more than anyone has said or written. I do not mean a simple abundance of words, rather, I mean, the richness of God’s hope for humanity and how we get there is an unprecedented adventure that we are all invited to join, to articulate, to write, to keep the word alive in lives well lived.
God cares about today, and if you will hear his voice he is speaking. Love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable realities (the question; Who is my neighbor? Is always a lie). Good religion organizes its institutional efforts and theological values around this inseparable reality of God and neighbor.
Christianity is meant to be lived and not just learned about. Being like Jesus in word and practice is more important than confessing belief in Jesus. Saying you’re a Christian based upon a confession and living a life that is inconsistent with being like Jesus is to have misunderstood the revelation of God in Christ, and in effect is a denial of belief. The religion of Jesus requires evidence of love, and of nonviolent living that rejects vengeance.
I was a youngster in the seventies and joined the U.S. Marine Corp. I was appointed the protestant lay leader for our helicopter squadron. I was still learning to be a Christian, my early role models of faith had not communicated nonviolence but patriotism, and nationalism. I was stationed at Fatima on the Japanese Island of Okinawa. One evening the chaplain and I went to the infantry camp on the north end of the Island to evangelize the grunts (a term for infantry personnel).
The camp was different from our airbase. It was fenced off with a tall chain-link fence and the entrance was a dirt road. Outside the gates of the infantry base was a small town comprised primarily of bars and prostitutes. I was passing out the four spiritual law tracts. An obviously inebriated Marine approached me to shake my hand. He called me brother and told me he loved Jesus and was a Christain. He was also holding hands with a young prostitute and had other plans for the rest of the night. I challenged him about his immediate condition and his intended use of the young woman with him. He responded that he was young, sowing wild oats, and Baptist, so his salvation was secure; this is bad religion.
Life is a collection of memories and events that influence and affect us. My religious formation has been an ongoing process since I was a little kid. I recall the first time I was confronted with death, a little puppy, it was a shocking experience and I wondered what kind of world I was living in. Remembering is an important aspect in scripture. Remembering moments when God acted, when God was near, are the moments that form our religious foundations.
I still remember as a child watching MLK Jr. on black and white television, the kind that had tubes. I was moved more by this man’s activism on behalf of humanity, by his theology, by his proclamation of Christ than anything I had ever heard. Yet, I was a white kid growing up in a town with separate movie theaters, stores, and housing areas, for Mexicans and the black experience was unknown to me. I only knew that I had learned two things very well; red and yellow black and white they are precious in his sight Jesus loves the little children of the world, and Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.
I was 16 years old the day I stood in the road in front of my hometown church and stopped cars in the road to invite them into the building to accept Christ lest they perish in eternal flames. It was my childish way of challenging the beliefs under which I had been reared. If it were true that God burned people throughout eternity, then, by all means, act like it and do something more than changing the sermon title on the church marquee! After this somewhat rebellious experiment, I knew something was wrong.
Violence is easy, it is an instinctual animal response, it satisfies the desire for vengeance. In the little town where I was raised, violence was normative, it was fight or be crushed. It seemed to be a lot like life, the challenge to fight against forces that hold you down. My father was a tough man, he’s 85 and still tough as nails even in the face of the forces of aging that challenge him each day. He was an oil field hand, a boilermaker, a tankee (oil tank builder); fighting was just everyday machismo. He also has a heart of compassion that is easily moved to giving in order to help suffering children. I was raised to be violent and to be Christian, the two do not mix; ultimately, I would have to decide for one or the other. It was a long time coming but the more I experienced the world, learned about history, and studied scripture, the more I was convinced that the way of Jesus was nonviolent.
The Christianity of my youth had not changed the world, it had spread a type of belief system, but it had not moved the world any closer to ending racism, or poverty, or correcting militarism, or correcting nationalism. It had prepared people with hope for heaven but not taught them to have hope for the repairing of the world. I had seen enough, lived long enough - by God’s grace – I knew that the work of God was not a rescue mission but a redemptive mission. I knew that if I could love and forgive others and hope for their redemption, for my redemption, in a broken world, then God’s faith for all of us was / is redemptive.
Good religion is activism advocating for merciful justice, for the healing of the world.
[i] The most helpful book I’ve read on Pentecostalism:
Anderson, Robert M. Vision of the Disinherited. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers,1979.
